Saturday, December 22, 2007

Tabbed Browsing on the XO

I'm sure in the long run the best browser on the XO will be a native, open source one (probably using WebKit), but at the moment, if you want tabs, and, if you're like me, you need tabs, then you need to get Opera running. The install is a little kludgy (by XO standards) and if you've upgraded to a recent development build (as I have, natch), you might have to launch from a terminal (opera) instead of the launcher.

Note that the OLPC Wiki instructions are better than the OLPC News Forum instructions, because the forum instructions have you use the tarball instead of the .rpm package, and you should always use the .rpm if you have the option because it makes it much easier to reliably update or uninstall. Also, the forum tells you to install the activity in /usr/share/activities, instead of the more proper /home/olpc/Activities.

The big fly in the Opera ointment is that it doesn't handle GMail's layout. Also, it is not keeping up with my typing in this Blogger textbox, so I don't know what is up with that.

3 comments:

Gnuosphere said...

"I'm sure in the long run the best browser on the XO will be a native, open source one (probably using WebKit)."

Forgive my browser code ignorance but does Gecko have any relationship to this? I've heard it is the current engine...is that correct?

BTW, have I mentioned how jealous I am that you have your XO and I don't yet? :) I've got two strikes against me. One, I didn't order until 1 week into G1G1 and two, I suspect the Canadian XOs (mine is shipping to Edmonton area) will roll in later than the US ones in general. Any Canadians out there receive their G1G1 XO yet?

Tom Hoffman said...

Peter,

Gecko is the Mozilla/Firefox renderer, and it is what the current Browse activity uses. WebKit is the renderer used by Konqueror/Safari (also open source). I read a while agot that someone had prototyped a WebKit based browser for Sugar and it was more memory-efficient than the current one.

Tom Hoffman said...

Oh, also, the Canadian orders are all behind. There's a comment about it on the front page of the OLPC wiki.